Les égouts, 2026

Bianca Prettau  

The night, the one that covers the city with an opaque veil, engulfing its contours in the depths of black and brown, as if the landscape itself were trying to conceal a truth that has become unbearable and rises in the distance in the vertical silhouettes of skyscrapers, phantom architectures of a distant power, almost erased, whose presence remains equally overwhelming, that which transforms the urban landscape into a space where lines dissolve, where forms disappear, and where matter seems to bear the scars of an internal collapse. The canvas concentrates in the foreground, on the right, in this almost liquid stain, an organic flow of a city that can no longer contain its own degradation which manifests in this orange form, an ambiguous color, both residual incandescence and the ultimate trace of life, whose murky glow seems to announce less a rebirth than a slow combustion.

And which makes this flow the true symbolic focal point of the canvas: the city is no longer content to be represented, it liquefies, loses its structure, abandons its stability and wounds itself in an amorphous matter, as if the very foundations of civilization were about to give way.

The world disintegrates under the weight of its own contradictions, where urbanity, once a promise of progress and power, becomes the stage for a silent decline. Here, not only an individual fault is designated, but a collective guilt, diffuse and faceless, inscribed in the chromatic depths of the painting, in its dark masses and in this strange orange wound that seems to seep from the pictorial surface and settles as a persistent unease, because nothing, in this vision, allows one to clearly distinguish the catastrophe from its representation, the landscape from its collapse, nor the city from what remains of its own memory.

Finally, the work reflects an obscure mirror back to the viewer: not the shock of witnessing the disappearance of a city, but that of recognizing, in its slow decay, the signs of a world we have helped build, to nourish, and perhaps to condemn. "the sewers" where architecture recedes, where matter collapses, and where orange persists as a sick glow, the catastrophe is no longer an event to come, but a process already engaged, which the canvas retains the trace of, silent and irreversible.